SCIENTISTS have discovered the perfect way to get rid of an annoying itch without adding to the irritation – and all you need is a mirror.

Troublesome insect bites and rashes that you just cannot shift could become a thing of the past, thanks to the work of a team at University of Lübeck, Germany.

They were inspired by a trick known as the rubber hand illusion that fools people into believing a fake hand is their own. It is incredibly easy to manipulate the perception of our own bodies by the brain.

The technique of reflecting a patient’s limb in a mirror has been successfully used to treat phantom limb pain.

The latest research shows how a similar illusion can fool people into feeling relief from an itch, even when they scratch the wrong place.

The team injected the right forearms of 26 male volunteers with itch-inducing chemical histamine, according to New Scientist magazine.

To mimic the red spot created by the injection, they painted a corresponding dot on the opposite arm so looked identical.

Each arm was scratched in turn and only scratching the injected arm provided relief…until the mirror was introduced.

The looking glass was placed in front of the itchy arm, blocking the human guinea pig's view of their right arm and reflecting back the non-itchy one in its place.

Volunteers were told to only look at the reflection, while each arm was again scratched in turn.

Amazingly they found that scratching the unaffected arm now gave relief to the painful injection.

The team calculated that this fake scratch provided around a quarter of the relief from a real one.

It concluded that visual signals to the brain can override messages from the body if there is a mismatch between them.

Francis McGlone of Liverpool John Moores University thinks the finding could lead to treatments for chronic itching where patients can often scratch their skin until it bleeds.

He told New Scientist: "This paper adds important insights into the complex mechanisms underlying itch – an often ignored sensory channel, but one that can have devastating consequences on quality of life for patients.”